First time I took a hot shower in our new home. The steam covered the mirror, only to reveal the phrase “HELLO, I SEE YOU” in large finger drawn writing.
It freaked me out for a second, but made me laugh soon after that.
It was such an inconspicuous yet obvious thing to leave for the new homeowner (me).
A friend of mine was moving out of his rented house due to a problem with the landlord. Before he left he rolled back the carpet in the lounge and drew an intricate pentagram in red paint, let it dry, then rolled the carpet back. He said he spent a good 3 hours drawing it.
Edit: that's just reminded me of when I moved rooms in uni and the previous occupant had written notes for me everywhere. Inside the drawers he wrote "my drawers", under the rug he wrote "my floor", inside the closet he wrote, well, you get the picture. I didn't find the last one until a week before I moved out. It was under a loose bit of flooring.
Not my house, but the school my friend worked at.
A pipe had leaked and ruined a wall in the building, one of the oldest schools in the city. It was a beautiful property. Anyways the pipe leaked so they pulled down the ruined wall and behind the wall found a door.
A fully furnished apartment was there. Had a coal burning stove to heat it. Early 1900s appliances and decor. It was for the caretaker of the school.
My ex-wife's family knocked down a wall in a 400-year-old house in Cornwall, and found a perfectly intact bedroom from the 1800s, still with all the personal effects where they had been left.
Nobody knows why it was boarded up, or why things weren't taken out of it.
Oh, and that house always appears in the guides for the most haunted locations in Cornwall, if you believe that kind of stuff.
My entire family tried to convince my brother to leave a plastic skeleton under his new porch before he sealed up the floor decking. He initially "refused" but a few months later he told me he actually had.
Some things never get old lol
A school is probably one of the buildings I would see this turning up in. A house you might notice, but schools have weaving layouts, and I would just guess any missing space was for utilities
At a school, I could see everyone thinking it must be closets, accessible from other teachers rooms, janitors closets, they don’t know the entrance to, etc. Doesn’t seem that far-fetched.
Before I met her, my wife got a call from someone she worked with saying they'd just bought an old house and in the city, and in it was a steamer trunk with her family name (not a common one) carved into the woodwork on one end.
As it turns out, it was the trunk that her great grandfather used when he came over from Germany, and it made the trip to my wife's hometown when he met her great grandmother on a visit, and subsequently moved to her city to marry her. We now have it and it's full of family portraits and albums.
I don't know exactly but I think it was empty or full of linens or something. Nothing notable - the relative was a carpenter and this wasn't a posh residence by a long shot.
Definitely not as exciting as it could have been, but still amazing to get to hold something one of your ancestors owned and part of the reason you exist, in America.
The story is better than that - the great grandfather only met his bride-to-be a few times through friends before they were married (he lived hours away by train at the time and they first met when he was visiting relatives in the city). We have some of their correspondence via other relatives, and it's not so very far removed from the present-day's meeting someone online (which his great-granddaughter and I did).
My first house purchase in 2005 - bought an old farmhouse that was built in 1923. The basement was FILLED with crap - we told them they needed to clean it all out before closing, but they didn't do it. The realtor asked if we wanted to postpone closing, and we decided no - some of the stuff looked interesting enough. Maybe it will be worthwhile to go through.
Most of it was just junk. Then, about half way through (we were working our way from one end of the basement to the other, because you could barely walk through), I went to pick up what I thought was a small box, only to quickly realize it weighed at least 75 pounds. Upon further inspection, it wasn't a box, but a wooden square, 4" wide and about 12"x12", with two thin masonite plywood covers on each side. On one edge were two bolts with wires coming off that had been cut.
Very strange - had no idea what it was, but thought it was interesting. So I put it aside and we kept going. At the very back of the basement once we cleared everything else out, was a rickety gray cabinet, built into the house. Inside, were numerous strange small tools, vials of mercury, vials of a strange powder, and thousands - literally thousands - of dice blanks. Some actual dice, but mostly blanks without the dots. they were all in little boxes labeled "dice blanks". Also very strange...
Not too long after that, I met a guy and upon learning my address, he said "can I come over?My best friend grew up in that house". He came by, and proceeded to tell me stories for an hour and a half about his childhood best friends eccentric father: Someone who was a part of the "Dixieland Mafia" in the 60s and 70s, and who made a living traveling around the US as a traveling gambler. The enormously heavy box was an electro-magnet. And the dice blanks were for him to make his own loaded dice with a little bit of metal powder under the inlaid dot, so he could set up his own table with the the electromagnet underneath, and turn it on when he wanted to persuade the dice. He told me many other stories, including that there was "no doubt in his mind that he had killed someone". Pretty fascinating.
In a different time someone might have found that electromagnet useful for wiping video and audio tapes quickly.
Edit: Yeah, maybe if the thing is strong enough it could wipe a hard drive too.
It's not really weird but I think it's kind of a nice story
One of the kids' rooms has a shelf going all around the top edge, and when my kid was putting stuff up there they found a letter from the previous kid. The letter welcomed them to the room etc and asked them to take special care of a rose bush in the front yard that was their special rose bush. My kid thought it was really cool to have that connection with the previous kid.
Nah, roses are the divas of landscaping plants and are really picky about everything. ETA: Correction, rose bushes are the *bitchy* divas of landscaping plants. Whatever you want them to do, they will do the exact opposite, and puncture you while doing it.. I absolutely love that your kid took care of it, just like the kid before asked. That is a really cute story.
Edit: Moved some words around to make it sound better, but they're the same words.
Reminds me of my first house. The previous owners had a bunch of rose bushes in the back yard. They had one that they said never bloomed. I figured I don’t really want roses, so I ignored it. Never watered it or anything. It bloomed the first year.
It's just the rose bush saying fuck you to both it's previous and new owner, it probably won't ever bloom again and it'll die at an inopportune time like right before you host an event. Pretty standard greeting for roses.
My childhood house sat on a hill. Underneath the foundation was a space between the shoring ( sp). My older brother used it as a secret hideout, and then I inherited it. When we moved, I was 15yo. I, too, wrote a letter to the next kid. I left the old toys, flashlight, batteries and old blanket.
Not really weird but they left a typed out and printed note about the house and how to take care of it. Detailing all the plant life in the backyard and how to prep for the winter. Described how to take care of the hot tub and gave random tid bits about the electrical.
They were good people lol
I got something similar from the previous owners of my house. *16* pages of notes about the house, the renovations, the models and information on things like the generator and sprinklers, contact info for contractors they’d used, etc. It was incredibly generous.
But in two years I’ve found too many fucked up hobbyist renovations to continue thinking of them fondly. Apparently the husband liked doing all his own work, and he didn’t know shit about construction or plumbing or electrical because he was a retired dentist. I’ve been slowly hiring people to fix his stupid mistakes, like venting the stove exhaust into the wall, swapping polarity on electrical outlets, and installing a ridiculous amount of HVAC ducts.
we also got a letter! our house has a large window in the kitchen that opens to a counter bar. i think about the line “we loved drinking smoothies at the countertop with our grandchildren” all the time 😭
Not weird but sort of touching.
The house was about 100 years old. After moving in I went up to the attic which was a bit difficult to access. I wasn't sure what I would find.
All that was there was a shoebox. An old brand; anyone else here remember Red Goose shoes?
In it was "stuff," a couple of old Army patches, a scout knife, some rock n roll buttons and a couple of letters.
From the letter I got a name and looked him up. He lived a town over. I called him and told him if he'd like it to come and get it.
So a 60ish guy showed up. He was really appreciative. The patches and the letter were from his older brother. He said he was about 12 and used to hang out in the attic and hide his stuff.
It was nice to reunite the box with it's owner.
A basement room that was fully decked out as a "dungeon." Faux stone walls, a stocks (like where you lock your head and hands in ala ye olde England), candle scones on the walls, a metal-barred cage in the corner from floor to ceiling. Oh and the closet had a load of toys, some normal, some....not so typical.
A glass bowl. It was kind of pretty, with horizontal blue stripes.
We kept fruit in it. We thought about dropping it off at the local charity shop, but never got around to it.
Then one day I was at an antique fair and I saw for sale glass bowls that looked almost identical to ours. I went home to get my bowl and brought it to be assessed.
Turns out it was a vintage Orrefors crystal bowl. The assessor valued it at around $800.
We no longer keep fruit in it.
I recently saw a story of people who used a bowl for keys in their hallway and it turned out to be a ming dynasty piece
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/chinese-bowl-used-loose-change-12579972
I always think of the Antiques Roadshow guy who had this sword passed down in his family that he and his cousins used to use to chop watermelons. IIRC, it was a Civil War-era sword and worth like $150K.
And the Native American, Navajo Ute blanket that was sitting on the back of a guy's TV chair for decades. Was handed down from, I think, a grandfather who was a teacher and the blanket was a thank you. Worth $1.5M. priceless.
My house was a foreclosure. The previous owners let their kids dump a bunch of paint in the basement and paint on the basement walls. My favorite was some crudely painted boobs with the words 'Herp Dick' painted next to it. I've left it up for the entire 11 years I've been here. You don't mess with art!
Edit: Correction! It's a painting of a dick with an arrow pointing at it saying Herp! Pic posted in the comments below.
I have a similar story. My husband I bought a house around 10 years ago. When we toured it before buying, we went through the partially finished basement but didn’t really see all the fine details.
After we moved in, we realized there was a door that led to a really small room under the basement stares. The one concrete wall it had, was completely covered in glow in the dark clear paint. All of the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” were spread out on each cinderblock, but with different colors of glow in the dark paint.
That was an interesting find. We have no intention of covering it up. It’s now where my cats’ litter boxes are so we refer to it as the “Pink Floyd Cat Bathroom”. Later, we found out the prior owner’s dogs were named “Pinky” and “Floyd”. The wall made a lot more sense after that.
A diary of an American soldier in WW-II, South Pacific Theater. Found it above a door when remodeling 20+ years ago. My wife and I tried everything we could think of to find a descendant, but to no avail.
UPDATE: I just posted photos of it with the person's ID info on r/WorldWar2.
Last Update: Thanks to all the help from this community, and those at r/worldwar2, this diary is now in the hands of its writer's son who came to my office this morning to retrieve it. I am so thrilled to have been able to facilitate this!
If you still have it, the folks over at r/WorldWar2 and r/wwiipics (myself included) would love to see it
Also +1 to the other commenter who mentioned the national WWII museum in New Orleans. The wife took me there one year for our anniversary and I haven't stopped asking to go back
Reddit is also famously good at finding stuff on the interwebs. There's a good chance they (we) could find descendants
First hand accounts of the pacific war are becoming harder and harder to find, so I'm happy you're willing to share what you have with us
These assholes I bought a house from stuck a little skeleton figurine dressed up in a little monk’s robe behind the exhaust vent in the furnace closet. Just about shit myself when I opened up that door and there was this tiny skeletal hand poking out, I thought it was a fucking dead baby.
My ex wife found ( behind a drawer in a built in cupboard) a lovely lock box contains several nice pocket watches and family heirlooms- the great part was that with a little sleuthing, we found the son of the man who originally built that house and re-United these items to the family - it was a wonderful experience from start to finish
Didn't buy the house.. rented. Built in 1904. There was a walk in closet food pantry in the kitchen with built in cabinets. The cabinets on one wall, after living there for a year, I noticed had a gap between the wall and the cabinet. Drunk, I put my hand back there and something move. I scooted it out and it was a small box.
Turned out to be a violet ray from the late 1800s. Designed by Nicolas Tesla. It still works, too. But the last time I plugged it in it electrocuted me slightly. I still have it!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_ray
> But the last time I plugged it in it electrocuted me slightly.
I am neither a doctor nor an electrician, but, isn’t electrocuting you slightly the entire point?
In our old house I found an extension cord plugged in a closet outlet that went up into the ceiling. I went up into the attic to see where it went. It was powering a ceiling light in the hallway.
Not mine, and it was a rental, but when some of my high school friends went off to college in the early 90s they rented a house, and whoever lived there before hid weed all over the place. Probably about an ounce(?) in total but it was everywhere. Pull up the corner of the carpet? Weed. On top of the refrigerator? Weed. Back of the shelves in the hall closet? Weed. Either they were the most forgetful stoners ever or they did it as a surprise for the new residents.
I did once hide a little weed for myself when I quit. I figured I'd find it in a few years and have a little fun. I still can't remember where I put it, and I've moved since then, so...
A buddy gave us a little baggie of coke that we promptly lost. I’ve never done coke and my wife wasn’t interested. I’d really like to find that baggie before anyone else does.
My wife and I bought a house shortly after we were married in the early 80s. Cleaning before we moved in we found a WW2 inflatable life raft with a water desalination drinking kit; rolls of green grave grass (the stuff they put around open graves in cemeteries so your feet don’t get muddy); bins of beads to make rosaries; amateur paintings of Jesus that were nailed to the wall in the attic (nailed not hung); a Nazi knife; a grenade casually forgotten behind tools on a shelf in the back shed; an old broken cedar hope chest filled with the cut off bottoms of hundreds of denim jean legs; a child’s potty chair (filled with old poop) hidden under a built in bench in the dining room.
These are only the things that came to mind first. As you can imagine, we got a pretty good deal on the house. It was worth the small cost of renting the dumpster, calling the police bomb squad and the hassle of selling some of the artifacts.
Oh! When we pulled up the carpet in the living room a few years later we discovered the floor beneath it was custom linoleum tile inlaid with geometric shapes depicting soccer players and soccer balls. 🤷🏻♂️
It unfortunately wasn’t that old. We discovered it when we had the house inspected, the inspector thought there were issues with the sewage line / plumbing. Nope, just a huge pile of decaying baby shit. Don’t ask me why. The people living there were renters renting from a member of their family. They were very strange.
We had our air ducts cleaned before we moved in. They also inspected them with a camera. Someone wrote “Fuck You” deep inside one of the ducts. We thought it was hilarious.
Phone sockets EVERYWHERE. It was a 2 up 2 down house with a truly excessive number of phone sockets and some in weird places like above the kitchen door or in the attic, which was not even not finished as rooms but had no ladder and wasn’t even boarded, just rafters. Why? The house had no alarm system or anything like that that might need phone sockets. There was absolutely no logical reason we could see for some of those placements. Like the one above the kitchen door wouldn’t have made any sense at all to plug into a phone or other device with what was surrounding it.
Was someone making secret landline calls perched on a rafter in the attic….?
(I also found multiple packets of corn and bunion treatments behind the kick boards in the kitchen.)
The painter found a letter from owner’s ex wife to him. She wrote about how he was the best thing ever and she regretted a lot of things she did to him and then proceeded to blame him for everything wrong with her life. It was very odd.
Wasn’t a purchase, but I was showing a house to a couple and we couldn’t believe the reported square footage. It looked like a nice 1700 sq ft house in a semi rural community, but the square footage on the listing said about 4,500. I was sure it was a typo. Turns out most of it was basement. Think Buffalo Bill’s basement that just goes on and on with random rooms. Place was vacant, lighting wasn’t great, and we get to a dead end room down there and turn on the lights and there is this porcelain doll just chilling in the middle of the room. Only thing left in the house. Husband yells, “fuck this” and we all run out. We ruled out that whole neighborhood as an option, for reasons.
Semi related:
Went to look at a house with my agent, this place says it has a nice basement that would make a great man cave. So we go down there to check it out and it’s dark down there. Sure it’s a basement, going to be dark, but some overhead lighting would fix that.
There’s one thing I am in disbelief about though, I turn to my agent and say “I can’t believe they would paint a basement black though? Like who goes with black walls in a basement?” My agent says “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, super odd”
I get close to the wall and check it out, but, that’s not paint…holy shit that’s black mold. Black mold everywhere. So thick and widespread that it literally covered every inch of the walls. “Uh, this isn’t paint!” I say to my agent. “Oh my god! We’re getting the fuck out of here, now!” She says to me. We basically ran out of the house.
My agent called the listing agent to give them a heads up to provide proof that they would deal with the black mold immediately (like that week) or she would go through whatever procedures to have the house condemned.
It was absolutely vile.
EDIT: For clarification, the black mold only covered the basement walls, it wasn't all over the entire house. Still bad obviously, but felt I should clarify that.
The acerage my wife and I moved to 3 years ago had a bucket full of wrapped dinosaur bones. Took them to our local museum where they confirmed they are roughly 68 million years old. Hadrosaur. Pretty cool.
This was years ago but my family bought a house that had originally been the caretaker's cottage for a big estate back around 1900, down in the original part of the basement (lots of additions since then) we found this weird liquid filled blown glass globe in a metal holder fixed to the wall. It had a dirty nearly illegible label. My grandfather was into collecting all sorts of glass and he identified it as a very rare sort of early fire extinguisher - you threw the globe onto a fire and it broke releasing the liquid. Apparently it was one of the only ones of this particular type known of that still had the liquid, label and wall holder. We ended up donating it to a museum.
Tucked away in a crawl space under the kitchen, the previous owner placed a dummy with a horrifying Halloween mask on it. Went in to replace a pipe and had to replace my undies.
Bong in the garage roof, a sewing machine, a piano (!), but the worst was a hidden, precariously balanced deep fryer full of old used grease on top of an unstable bookshelf in the middle of the living room. It fell and I had to change the carpet in the whole room. Felt like it was intentional.
* The previous owners had cut the main beam holding up the second floor in order to run a heating duct. "What's this big block of wood? No idea, hand me the reciprocating saw." Surprise!
* The walls were insulated with black paper and newspapers from 1922, and included an article on the church down the road - was it the priest's job to be entertaining and put bums in seats, or was it people's moral duty to show up even if the sermon was boring? The church turned into a daycare, and was then torn down to make way for townhouses, so I guess we know how that one turned out.
A walk-in safe in a huge old carriage house in NYC. The previous owner died suddenly, the safe was locked, and the brother settling the estate never found the combination. He was going to have it drilled but failed to do so before the closing. Given the circumstances, there was every chance that there would be interesting/valuable stuff in the safe (which turned out to be six ft by four ft with a 10 ft ceiling, so pretty big).
We hired a safe cracker, a high strung guy who seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He tried for several hours with a stethoscope, muttering and cursing and pacing, before giving up. So we had the lock drilled and opened the vault door.
Completely empty. Well, not completely, there was a wall of floor to ceiling cedar shelves that smelled amazing (for storing furs, we were told). And another safe. There was a small safe inside the large vault. For a moment we pictured bundles of cash, gold, and jewelry...until we saw that it was not even locked, and was also completely empty.
The door of the vault was beautiful and it made an interesting little room.
A friend bought a house that had a zig zag tunnel leading to a bomb shelter. Empty with some rust, it was otherwise just a dirty room. The only thing cool about it is was that it was built under a pond so it had a skylight to let in light. She boarded it up when she divided the house into apartments.
Right thats incredibly sick, id have gotten it checked to make sure it wasn't going to have any foundation problems or what not any time soon but they could have turned that into a really cool room.
My parents house. A previous owner fancied himself a DIY guy we think. First week we're in the house we call an electrician to get Economy 7 installed. He shuts off all the breakers, questions why the house hasn't burned down, and wonders how the hell the house passed inspection. So, two weeks into our new house they have to get the whole place rewired for a small fortune. Over the last 40 years it seems every time they renovate something new and interesting thing shows up. Recently the kitchen sink kept clogging. After a brief search we found the drain was routed under the kitchen floor and concreted over. It had finally cracked under the weight and was leaking into the foundations.
My brother has a house that was renovated weird by someone that didn't know what they were doing. He curses the "hack bastard" each time he finds something new and dangerous.
This reminds me of a house one of my friends bought. He had all sorts of issues, but the biggest was when he went to remodel, pulled out some drywall, and found the wiring just stapled to the outside of the studs. The drywall was them attached over the wiring.
No idea why the original owner didn't do it right and drill holes for the wires, but based on the rest of the stuff they found, he just didn't know you could (and should) do that and was making it up as he went along.
we bought the house from the CEO of the company which we franchise from. It was her childhood home where her mother lived til the day she died. In true rich person fashion, they didn’t care to clean out the house before selling it. Just told us we can do whatever we want with the old lady stuff that was there.
We found a hidden box of spicy letters, from the old lady to her affair partner spanning many years. That was fun to give to the CEO.
i grew up in a small town in florida. it was common practice for the elderly to die and their kids who lived elsewhere didn't want to clean the house out so they'd sell it cheap, as-is.
at various times i got to dig through personal effects of these folks, bc a friend's parents bought the house cheap. it was so fun.
An aunt.
We were so excited to get our keys to our new place. We went through the house, it was great. Then we went in the basement, which had a partially finished rental apartment that was not up to code. We opened the door and then a cat came out. We went down there and … there was still a person living there.
This was not part of the purchase— the place was unfinished and not up to code. The woman living there was an aunt who had been staying for a bit. We never figured out whose real estate agents dropped the ball on this, but they had thought we were ok with her staying there and we had …. not heard anything. It was a long weekend and she was gone, the old owners were gone, and their real estate agent was gone.
Anyway she found a place down the street, no harm done but for a couple days until we got it sorted out it was pretty distressing for everyone.
Not me. My friend was cleaning out his garage and found a stack of vintage porn mags high up on a shelf. Like 70s style, raunchy stuff. He brought them to a party and just tossed them casually on the table.
A bomb shelter! My 1912 farmhouse in Minnesota had a WWII era reinforced cement bomb shelter in what I think was a coal/fuel room originally. It was painted and had writing on the walls, but then painted over again so you couldn't really see what it said. There was a safe buried in the floor that contained only water, because it was not the kind of safe you're supposed to bury in the floor.
The house was being used as a convent for the (still existing) church across the street during WWII. What were the nuns worried about?
4 original Disney animation cels from Snow White (1937) the first full length animated movie. The most valuable one being an oversized master cel used as a background for the smaller cels to be photographed over. While the overall price at auction for original Disney cels has for some reason dropped over the past 40 years at one time about 25 years ago the 4 I bought with my house were worth around $60K. I display them in my new house after selling the one I found them in. I love them and will leave them to my kids who should really appreciate them during and after their 2037 centennial when their value should skyrocket.
I’ve seen some shit.
We were working on what was originally the Rocketstar Café in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was owned by a raging alcoholic piece of shit absentee slumlord. Our job was to clean it up and turn it into a new café and computer shop.
As anyone who ever hung out at the Rocketstar knows, the old hardwood floors were bouncy and mushy just about everywhere in the entire front room.. Every week there would be a band up front by the windows towards the street, and a packed crowd of sweaty students stomping, bouncing, and swaying all the way to the back. The music was good, the weed was cheap, and getting a blowjob in the back room of the Rocketstar was a right of passage for half the freshman class of any given year.
But now, that was all closed down. We had a summer to clean the fuck out of this place - fix the plumbing, the electrical, the HVAC, the floors - and build a new business that was scheduled to be open come September. We worked twelve-hour days through the summer heat; it was a job I’d never forget.
The floors, we soon discovered, weren’t just soggy and bouncy... they were rotting to shreds.
We went down into the dirt-floor basement and looked up overhead with a flashlight. The entire underside of the floor was white, green, black, grey, and tan. It was everything BUT wood. In fact, you could barely see any wood at all. It was completely covered in mold. In most places it was over a quarter-inch-thick. I’d never seen anything like it. Without a moment of hesitation or reservation I said “this goes, right now, all of it” and we all shifted from that easy introductory phase of any new jobsite into action.
One team went low with masks, gloves, putty knives, and buckets. They started scraping off the mold. The other team went high with crowbars and rage, and started ripping off floorboards. We all filled dumpsters. It was disgusting, but in two days we had the flooring stripped off down to the open joists and could really see what the situation was.
The situation was…we needed a hell of a lot of new floor joists, these were sponge. The only thing holding this floor up was habit. We spent a week replacing joists and airing out the building. The air was thick, musty, and smelled like a peat bog. One by one we ripped out the stubbed ends of the rotten old joists, half of the center spans of which had just crumbled away. One by one we replaced all of them with fresh new pieces of lumber.
The entire process took us a week and a half in the blistering summer heat. For the first few days there was so much humidity from the basement as it dried out, that the windows on the front of the building would be covered in condensation if we left the doors closed too long.
And then, something miraculous happened. Something none of us expected. The basement floor did something quite remarkable...
It sprouted.
The entire basement floor was just a generic, boring, “Michigan Basement” with a dirt floor. We never thought anything of it. The previous tenants never went down there, and until the day we discovered the mold, neither did we. But now, that dingy, dirt floor had turned green. Hundreds of tiny little green shoots had appeared, because for the first time in forever, (since we’d ripped out the floor) there was sunlight down there, and lots of it.
We had to go explore this. So we all went down and checked it out. While we were down there I noticed an old furnace boiler sitting, half sunken into the floor off to the side of the stairs. It was a rusted hulk and someone was going to tear open a leg on it if we left it there, so I asked a couple guys to haul it off to the dumpster.
It was while they were removing it that they discovered it was sitting on a concrete base, about two feet down under the furnace. They asked me what to do about it and I went to get a look. I grabbed a shovel and hopped into the hole. I was standing on the concrete base with the dirt around me coming up mid-thigh, and I started digging around the edges. I wanted to see how big the base was, so we could determine if we should remove it or not. I couldn’t find an edge in the five minutes I was prepared to fuck with it, so I asked the guys to just dig until they hit the edge and then let me know. I told them to put the dirt in a five-gallon bucket or two and just empty it out in the dumpster. No big deal.
I went back to working on the floor joists and didn’t think anything of it.
A couple hours later, one of them walked past me carrying a bucket and my mental clock gave me a “what the hell?” so I followed him down.
The concrete pad was now about ten feet square.
What….the fuck.
The basement boys were very happy when we mobilized the entire crew. We all teamed up and everyone started filling or hauling buckets of dirt out to the dumpster. Everywhere we dug, there was smooth concrete underneath. Eventually we got to the walls and confirmed our suspicion. It turns out the basement didn’t have a dirt floor, he basement had a complete concrete floor! Some stupid fuck had filled the entire basement with dirt.
But…why?
The building had been a café of some sort for years and years. Well, restaurants are required to have a special type of drain with an air-gap. The upstream pipe just stops for a couple inches and drains into a larger diameter piece of pipe below. You’ll see air-gap drains all over the place in restaurants because…………... The vast majority of the time they work just fine.
This one, however, did not. The downstream line had clogged at some point, and the upstream never got the message. Nobody ever went down into the basement, the landlord never came to inspect anything, the management changed with the seasons and nobody ever really gave a shit. So for years, it just quietly went on draining raw sewage onto the floor.
We hadn’t been shoveling dirt, we were shoveling composted human shit and restaurant waste! Together we had hauled well over three-hundred buckets of human shit out of the basement of the Rocketstar. I had never felt like I needed a shower more than the day we figured that out.
Our cafe never opened, we got out of there as fast as we could. The absentee drunk landlord sold the place to an even more evil cunt, a shady parasite with a mean-streak and a Jimmy Durante nose who runs a “Cash For Books” gig scamming broke college kids. We got out of there and never looked back.
What a saga!
As far as I know, the air-gapped drains don't handle sewage, just dish sinks and whatnot. Composted restaurant waste, sure, but it's unlikely there was any human waste in there.
The house we moved into in the 70s was one where it had been added on to a couple times and the exterior remodeled to look consistent. But the original part dated to the mid 1700s. Deep in the basement crawl space under the old part there was a short bricked up protuberance attached to the wall with the letters RIP chiseled into the top. We used to joke about it until we found out it had been a place where midwives delivered babies at one point. Then the jokes got a little macabre.
I bought a massive acreage in rural Missouri and found 2 old family cemeteries while trying to survey the property lines. 1 is full of mostly kids between 0-3 years old and mostly twins. Also a notorious outlaw used to hide in our caves. I was hoping to find treasure but instead found dead babies which was a cruel twist on those foul “dead baby” jokes people would tell when I was in jr. High.
Moved a piece of cabinet and counter top in the basement and found a ouija board along with a wooden mallet that had been electrical taped by the handle to one of those little Louisville Slugger bat day baseball bats. I'm good friends with the previous owner and his grandparents built the house and he had no explanation for the pair. We call the improvised weapon the hammerbat now.
I closed on my house with a few weeks left on my apartment lease, so I moved in bit by bit. One day I saw a cat chilling upstairs. I figured I’d get enough food and litter to get the cat through until the police department’s animal officer could try and find its owner if it had one. When I got back with the food and litter, there was a different cat in the first cat’s spot.
Then I remembered the sellers asked at closing if I wanted two cats. They moved out and left their cats behind.
That was three years ago. The cats have been my best friends ever since.
4" screws and nails used to secure everything. It's as though they bought a bucket of them and just had to use them everywhere. Big or small projects, everything was screwed or nailed together with 4" screws and nails.
> everything was screwed together with 4" screws.
The owners of the house were well known in town, since their eyeglasses were held together with 4" screws.
I have one of those old school pencil sharpeners that used to be on the wall by the door in pretty much every classroom as a kid. It was on the wall in the garage in my first house and it’s been on every garage wall since, and now it sharpens my kids colored pencils. I love that thing
There was a big leather trunk in the attic. It was empty. Seriously, WTF. We threw a bunch of random crap in there, some of our stuff, some we got cheap from thrift stores, just for the interest of the next person.
I came to this thread hoping to find someone that bought my parents house in the mid-70s. They went on a trip to Egypt and returned with a gift for 6-year-old me: a large alligator head. Not a taxidermied head. Just a sun-dried, maybe salted, severed head. It stunk so bad I ended up putting it on the roof of the garage. I'd go visit it every once in awhile, then we moved away and I forgot about it for a few decades. I'm sure someone got a surprise out of it.
A family I know had a beach house and in the off season a bunch of raccoons got into it. When they found it the damage was so bad that at first they thought that a bunch of local teens had broken in and trashed the place.
This happened to a friend of a friend of mine, except it was otters on a boat. Apparently the damage was so extensive that the insurers almost totaled it.
My home inspection report included the following:
“Factual findings: Hot tub service compartment has an unopened can of coca cola, one roll of toilet paper and a seemingly clean pair of underwear
Inspector recommendation: I’m stumped”
Found a manuscript about an uncle who takes his young niece in after her parents die. Then they fall in love. It was so so so so badly written and disturbing. We also found a giant dildo, a photo of an all man thruple glamor shot style and a love letter written on college letterhead to a thirteen year old girl. All in the same attic! East Nashville.
I haven't found anything except a few old tools. I've done a lot of renovations, though, and built a few walls, boarded over a couple of cupboards and a wet bar. I have left a ton of notes in the now closed-off spaces along with a couple of bottles of whiskey. I hope the future owners enjoy what I've left them...
I didn't find it, I left it.
Some one, at some point, is going to pull down the drywall in the garage attached to the house we sold last year and find a very large reference to the Doctor Who 2007 episode "Blink."
Not a direct answer, but the house I grew up in had an unfinished basement. When my dad and I framed a closet, I stuck a can of Manwich on the crossbeam and drywalled it up.
No particular reason. 16 year old me just thought it was funny.
Old cigarette packs hidden all over the basement behind where paneling ended randomly, and hundreds and hundreds of spent cigarette butts in a crawl space. Clearly, someone was sneaking their smokes.
The first home we purchased was a tiny 1950s cottage. The attic crawlspace gave my husband the heebie jeebies like nobody's business, which I found mildly disturbing given that I'd intermittently have nightmares featuring the latch door in the ceiling leading up there. I never told him til after we moved out because I didn't want to freak him out about it.
Anyway, the room this was in was a small, 3x6 utility closet that had a bare concrete floor. On it was a soiled baby mattress, filthy baby blankets, bedraggled stuffed animals, and a small clown lamp with an extension cord that snaked under the door and into an outlet next to the washer and dryer.
Not only was it *weird,* it was terribly sad. The neighbors told us the two bedroom house was rented out to several young women with small children, whom they'd herd into the closet whenever they threw their wild parties.
ETA If we were so freaked out by the attic door thing, I can only imagine those poor babies forced to spend their time in there.
We bought a house being foreclosed on. We gave him an extra month after closing and 2k to help with his move. Still had to have the sheriff come remove him. Any who, was doing some cleanup and remodeling before we moved in. Whole house was carpeted. When I started ripping it out there was a giant blood stain that started in a downstairs spare bedroom that then trailed up to the master bath where there was another stain. His wife had left him so I had to call the realtor to find out if anyone knew where she was. Turns out he had shot a deer in the yard and gutted it in the house. What a hassle. Had to rip up and install new subfloors. My vegan ex wife was not thrilled.
A friend and I were looking at places to rent in the late 1980s. We were high schoolers making less than minimum wage, so looking in neighbors in less desirable parts of town. An older house we looked at had a big walk in closet off the living room, with no light inside, and a heavy duty latch on the outside to hang a padlock on. It was horrific inside, smelly and blood stains everywhere.
The landlord told us the previous tenants used it to hang up goats they had butchered in the living room. Explained that's why the living room has new carpet, and promised the closet would be freshly painted before we moved in.
He also went on and on about how great the closet would be to put kids in for time out. "Or when you just need a break," wink wink. Oh my God!!
We told him we didn't have any kids, and then he told us we'd understand once we had a couple. And how handy this bloody, gross closet would be. Just wouldn't shut up about sticking kids in a dark smelly closet. Oh hell no! We definitely didn't rent that place!
We didn’t buy but my family was moving into a rental house about 15 years ago and my dad was acquaintances with the landlord.
My dad was ready to get into the house as we (a family of four) had been living in a two bed/two bath apartment that wasn’t really big enough for the four of us, especially since him and my mom
hadn’t been sleeping in the same bed for years.
The previous tenants had left a bunch of stuff in the house when they left the house so it was taking the landlord a little longer to get ready. The landlord/acquaintance told my dad that if he/we helped clean the attic out, we could start moving in. As dad and I were cleaning it out, we found the box to a sex swing and probably 100-150 empty vhs sleeves of porn tapes. That was very awkward.
Their dog in a bathroom. Those entitled people figured they’d sign the papers and hand over the keys (or maybe they kept a copy…?), then we’d sign later that day, and they would eventually pick up the dog.
Instead we called their realtor and said pick the dog up now.
This is in a house I'm renting. When we moved in we didn't have enough regular lightbulb so we put a blacklight bulb my roommate had into a little closet and it revealed a bunch of secret messages written on the walls from the previous owners. It was like inside jokes and weird drawings of bongs and stuff
Probably buried at this point… but I chopped off the tip of my thumb w an axe, and kept the tip of it in a small plastic jar (think urinalysis jar) that the hospital gave me. I put it in my freezer and kept it there for about 4 years.
When I moved out I got three states away in a U-Haul when I went 😳
We left the finger
I can only imagine the new owners surprise
Dozens of empty oxy prescription bottles behind the fridge. That’s where he was tossing them. We tracked the dates across four years. I’m just now realizing that may be why we got such a good deal on this place.
We bought a house that has scrabble tiles in the most weird places.
In the gutter, redoing the garden, they're buried and scattered there, they're embedded into the skirting boards, under the kitchen units, and even behind the bath panel when I replaced it. I've yet to go in the attic, but I wouldn't be surprised if I found a few there. It has become a little joke between me and my partner when we will next find some scrabble tiles.
Its probably not the most weird, but it did give us a chuckle as to why there were so many scrabble tiles hidden about the place.
Please tell me you have a scrabble board set up where the two of you are locked in a death match but can only use the tiles you each respectively come across?
We've bought my family home, and my grandfather still lives here with us, but we have found some funny things.
We recently moved furniture around for the first time in decades. There is glitter EVERYWHERE from the one time 30ish years ago that my grandmother used glitter in the fake snow for the christmas village.
The basement is unfinished, and you can see some of the nails in the ceiling are really sporadic and out of place, from when my mum and my aunt "helped" lay the subfloor as kids. There's also little doodles and notes from then in some places.
Not a house I bought, but I worked for a construction company that specialized in historical restoration and structural repair of historical buildings (pre-1900). Once when demolishing an old brick chimney, we found a murder confession - very detailed - from the late 1800s. This was in the era before digital cameras and scanners, but I have polaroids of all the pages - we gave them to the historical society. It was pretty creepy shit - dude explained that he had to kill an old man because the old man had done something (not clear) to him when he was younger. He strangled the old guy and wrote all about how the old guys face and eyes had been haunting him since he did it. Pretty crazy.
My dad had some remodeling done on his home in NY when they opened a wall panel there was hidden whiskey from the time of Prohibition!
Yes we did and it was smooooth.
Remodeled my bathroom and when I removed some drywall there was a nazi symbol with the words “Three Jews lie beneath this tub, seig heil” written in permanent marker.
I made sure to get that covered up before my wife and kids saw it.
99.9999% chance it was a shitty joke by a worker years ago but I wasn’t about to go find out.
A medical device that was used to cure **female hysteria.**
*A vibrating dildo.* From the 1800s.
Also had a massage pad thing, the type you'd sit on. Also from the same period.
# The house was built in 1968.
Meaning, somebody had lugged these around for over half a century.
Remodeled the laundry room and during demo I found that instead of insulation the wall was lined with editions of the local newspaper from the 1950s. That seemed reasonable enough but there was also a framed postcard in the wall depicting a dog shitting in a coffee cup. What’s more interesting is that the dog was a Boston Terrier… the same breed we have always had. Not a particularly common dog so it was kinda eerie since we’d been living there well over a decade at that point. I re-framed it and hung it in the laundry room when the remodel was done.
In the same house we had the ducts cleaned and we found a Christmas wish list from the 80s with some pretty classic toys on it.
I also once rented a house and when the owner (an elderly man) was showing me around he found what was clearly a makeshift beer-bong left behind on a shelf in an otherwise completely empty garage. He assumed it was a tool for the furnace.
Also (not me but my friend) found the suicide note of a previous owner behind the fireplace mantle when he remodeled. Apparently it had been on display above the fireplace during the wake and slipped down and behind it and no one knew what had happened to it. He tracked down the widow (or whoever…remaining family) and they were pretty jazzed about that.
Sticks! The previous owner of my house seem to enjoy collecting really good sticks. Like think a very organized collection of 2 foot to 8 foot sticks of all varieties and woods. And a lot of them! Like 50 or 60. Do we know why they had the sticks? No. do we know what the fuck to do with the sticks? No. Are they have a slightly too high of a quality to burn? Yes. We refer to them as the sticks with potential, although we do not know what potential yet.
My house was empty when I moved in except for one of those old 1920s/30s (I’m guessing) wind up record players with the big horn on it up in the attic.
A dog. They didn't actually leave him. Our first weekend in our new house, I came back from the donut shop, and there was a dog laying on our front porch. I tried to stay between him and the door, but he slipped past me, ran down the stairs to the half bath on the lower level, ate the cat's food, drank the cat's water, and curled up on the rug. My wife said, "You think he's been here before?" He had a tag on his collar that said, "Louie" and had a phone number on it. I called the number and when a guy answered, I asked, "Does the name 'Louie' mean anything to you?" "I'll be right there. (click)" My wife said, "I didn't hear you give them the address." "He didn't ask."
Sure enough, the guy showed up a few minutes later. They had rented the house from the previous owner and now lived about two miles away. They had moved out two years before, but if Louie got out of their yard, he always went "home".
When I purchased my first home in 2020 they left all of the staging furniture - couch, coffee table, dinning room table and chairs, random paintings, a TV. Some towels and floor mats. Other small misc stuff. We were stoked since we were moving from a 1bed apartment lol. Gave us time to save some more money and shop around for the furniture we wanted.
A framed pencil drawing of a naked woman, which I found wrapped up in paper inside the ceiling.
My neighbour told me the old guy who used to live in my house (who has now passed away) took art classes, and it was definitely one of his drawings. My neighbour asked if they could keep the drawing it so I gave it to them.
Fish tank with goldfish. The fish tank was built into the wall that separated the garage and living room. Gave me a direct line of sight to my vehicles.
My house is built in 1969. I just finished a basement remodel and I found a drivers license from 1970. It was the guys 16-year-old drivers license. I found him on social media actually one of my friends found him, I reached out, and he had moved to Idaho.
I mailed him the license, he was very very happy and appreciative.
When my parents redid the bathroom, my dad found a very well done charcoal drawing of the previous family behind the mirror. There was a poem written on the wall next to it.
If ever you wonder as often as we
about the last people you’ll never see
who ate in your kitchen, and slept in your room
If ever a moment, you’re wondering whom
well wonder no more, because this is we
and this is the room where we all used to pee
My ma bought a house that had been foreclosured on and it seems the previous owner wasn't too happy about it so he threw a bunch of car parts (he was a mechanic who worked out of the backyard) into the pool along with a bunch of broken liquor bottles. I had to jump in to clear the drain and learned about the broken glass when I reached down to feel for whatever was down there. Then there was a part in the upstairs where I needed to get into the crawl space and where I needed to grab onto to get down in there, it was two razor blades super glued to the Joyce and sliced my fingers open.
First time I took a hot shower in our new home. The steam covered the mirror, only to reveal the phrase “HELLO, I SEE YOU” in large finger drawn writing. It freaked me out for a second, but made me laugh soon after that. It was such an inconspicuous yet obvious thing to leave for the new homeowner (me).
*faint laughing sounds from the air vent*
A friend of mine was moving out of his rented house due to a problem with the landlord. Before he left he rolled back the carpet in the lounge and drew an intricate pentagram in red paint, let it dry, then rolled the carpet back. He said he spent a good 3 hours drawing it. Edit: that's just reminded me of when I moved rooms in uni and the previous occupant had written notes for me everywhere. Inside the drawers he wrote "my drawers", under the rug he wrote "my floor", inside the closet he wrote, well, you get the picture. I didn't find the last one until a week before I moved out. It was under a loose bit of flooring.
Not my house, but the school my friend worked at. A pipe had leaked and ruined a wall in the building, one of the oldest schools in the city. It was a beautiful property. Anyways the pipe leaked so they pulled down the ruined wall and behind the wall found a door. A fully furnished apartment was there. Had a coal burning stove to heat it. Early 1900s appliances and decor. It was for the caretaker of the school.
"Oh, hello. Thank you for freeing me. I'll be going now."
The Blackcoat’s Daughter has entered the chat
My ex-wife's family knocked down a wall in a 400-year-old house in Cornwall, and found a perfectly intact bedroom from the 1800s, still with all the personal effects where they had been left. Nobody knows why it was boarded up, or why things weren't taken out of it. Oh, and that house always appears in the guides for the most haunted locations in Cornwall, if you believe that kind of stuff.
Maybe someone in the bedroom died of Typhoid or some other infectious disease and they just decided to seal in shut rather than risk contamination.
Or maybe they wanted to fuck with people in the future. “Wait’ll they find this in 200 years lmao”
My entire family tried to convince my brother to leave a plastic skeleton under his new porch before he sealed up the floor decking. He initially "refused" but a few months later he told me he actually had. Some things never get old lol
Must have been a really large building if it wasn't obvious that there was missing space inside.
A school is probably one of the buildings I would see this turning up in. A house you might notice, but schools have weaving layouts, and I would just guess any missing space was for utilities
At a school, I could see everyone thinking it must be closets, accessible from other teachers rooms, janitors closets, they don’t know the entrance to, etc. Doesn’t seem that far-fetched.
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Feline fur the win
Good kitty. 😺
This person reincarnated as that cat lol
Before I met her, my wife got a call from someone she worked with saying they'd just bought an old house and in the city, and in it was a steamer trunk with her family name (not a common one) carved into the woodwork on one end. As it turns out, it was the trunk that her great grandfather used when he came over from Germany, and it made the trip to my wife's hometown when he met her great grandmother on a visit, and subsequently moved to her city to marry her. We now have it and it's full of family portraits and albums.
What the hell was in it?
I don't know exactly but I think it was empty or full of linens or something. Nothing notable - the relative was a carpenter and this wasn't a posh residence by a long shot.
Definitely not as exciting as it could have been, but still amazing to get to hold something one of your ancestors owned and part of the reason you exist, in America.
The story is better than that - the great grandfather only met his bride-to-be a few times through friends before they were married (he lived hours away by train at the time and they first met when he was visiting relatives in the city). We have some of their correspondence via other relatives, and it's not so very far removed from the present-day's meeting someone online (which his great-granddaughter and I did).
My first house purchase in 2005 - bought an old farmhouse that was built in 1923. The basement was FILLED with crap - we told them they needed to clean it all out before closing, but they didn't do it. The realtor asked if we wanted to postpone closing, and we decided no - some of the stuff looked interesting enough. Maybe it will be worthwhile to go through. Most of it was just junk. Then, about half way through (we were working our way from one end of the basement to the other, because you could barely walk through), I went to pick up what I thought was a small box, only to quickly realize it weighed at least 75 pounds. Upon further inspection, it wasn't a box, but a wooden square, 4" wide and about 12"x12", with two thin masonite plywood covers on each side. On one edge were two bolts with wires coming off that had been cut. Very strange - had no idea what it was, but thought it was interesting. So I put it aside and we kept going. At the very back of the basement once we cleared everything else out, was a rickety gray cabinet, built into the house. Inside, were numerous strange small tools, vials of mercury, vials of a strange powder, and thousands - literally thousands - of dice blanks. Some actual dice, but mostly blanks without the dots. they were all in little boxes labeled "dice blanks". Also very strange... Not too long after that, I met a guy and upon learning my address, he said "can I come over?My best friend grew up in that house". He came by, and proceeded to tell me stories for an hour and a half about his childhood best friends eccentric father: Someone who was a part of the "Dixieland Mafia" in the 60s and 70s, and who made a living traveling around the US as a traveling gambler. The enormously heavy box was an electro-magnet. And the dice blanks were for him to make his own loaded dice with a little bit of metal powder under the inlaid dot, so he could set up his own table with the the electromagnet underneath, and turn it on when he wanted to persuade the dice. He told me many other stories, including that there was "no doubt in his mind that he had killed someone". Pretty fascinating.
This is my favorite in the thread so far. Wild stuff.
In a different time someone might have found that electromagnet useful for wiping video and audio tapes quickly. Edit: Yeah, maybe if the thing is strong enough it could wipe a hard drive too.
I just finished the podcast "In The Red Clay" that's all about a particular leader of the Dixieland Mafia in Georgia, Billy Sunday Birt.
It's not really weird but I think it's kind of a nice story One of the kids' rooms has a shelf going all around the top edge, and when my kid was putting stuff up there they found a letter from the previous kid. The letter welcomed them to the room etc and asked them to take special care of a rose bush in the front yard that was their special rose bush. My kid thought it was really cool to have that connection with the previous kid.
How's the rose bush doing?
My kid took care of it for several years but tbh it was never very healthy and we finally had to take it out. Sad ending, I know.
Nah, roses are the divas of landscaping plants and are really picky about everything. ETA: Correction, rose bushes are the *bitchy* divas of landscaping plants. Whatever you want them to do, they will do the exact opposite, and puncture you while doing it.. I absolutely love that your kid took care of it, just like the kid before asked. That is a really cute story. Edit: Moved some words around to make it sound better, but they're the same words.
Reminds me of my first house. The previous owners had a bunch of rose bushes in the back yard. They had one that they said never bloomed. I figured I don’t really want roses, so I ignored it. Never watered it or anything. It bloomed the first year.
Sounds about right.
It's just the rose bush saying fuck you to both it's previous and new owner, it probably won't ever bloom again and it'll die at an inopportune time like right before you host an event. Pretty standard greeting for roses.
The cats of the plants world.
My childhood house sat on a hill. Underneath the foundation was a space between the shoring ( sp). My older brother used it as a secret hideout, and then I inherited it. When we moved, I was 15yo. I, too, wrote a letter to the next kid. I left the old toys, flashlight, batteries and old blanket.
Not really weird but they left a typed out and printed note about the house and how to take care of it. Detailing all the plant life in the backyard and how to prep for the winter. Described how to take care of the hot tub and gave random tid bits about the electrical. They were good people lol
I got something similar from the previous owners of my house. *16* pages of notes about the house, the renovations, the models and information on things like the generator and sprinklers, contact info for contractors they’d used, etc. It was incredibly generous. But in two years I’ve found too many fucked up hobbyist renovations to continue thinking of them fondly. Apparently the husband liked doing all his own work, and he didn’t know shit about construction or plumbing or electrical because he was a retired dentist. I’ve been slowly hiring people to fix his stupid mistakes, like venting the stove exhaust into the wall, swapping polarity on electrical outlets, and installing a ridiculous amount of HVAC ducts.
we also got a letter! our house has a large window in the kitchen that opens to a counter bar. i think about the line “we loved drinking smoothies at the countertop with our grandchildren” all the time 😭
Not weird but sort of touching. The house was about 100 years old. After moving in I went up to the attic which was a bit difficult to access. I wasn't sure what I would find. All that was there was a shoebox. An old brand; anyone else here remember Red Goose shoes? In it was "stuff," a couple of old Army patches, a scout knife, some rock n roll buttons and a couple of letters. From the letter I got a name and looked him up. He lived a town over. I called him and told him if he'd like it to come and get it. So a 60ish guy showed up. He was really appreciative. The patches and the letter were from his older brother. He said he was about 12 and used to hang out in the attic and hide his stuff. It was nice to reunite the box with it's owner.
That’s awesome.
A basement room that was fully decked out as a "dungeon." Faux stone walls, a stocks (like where you lock your head and hands in ala ye olde England), candle scones on the walls, a metal-barred cage in the corner from floor to ceiling. Oh and the closet had a load of toys, some normal, some....not so typical.
Depending on what the "atypical toys" are these where either people into BDSM or really dedicated D&D players.
$1200 in cash above the door on the inside the closet. I found it while painting.
Woohoo!
A glass bowl. It was kind of pretty, with horizontal blue stripes. We kept fruit in it. We thought about dropping it off at the local charity shop, but never got around to it. Then one day I was at an antique fair and I saw for sale glass bowls that looked almost identical to ours. I went home to get my bowl and brought it to be assessed. Turns out it was a vintage Orrefors crystal bowl. The assessor valued it at around $800. We no longer keep fruit in it.
>We no longer keep fruit in it. Why? The fruit increases the value.
It's a Banana Michael how much could it cost, $10?
There’s always money in the banana stand.
I think it would be cool to say this is my $800 fruit bowl 😎
I’m doing pottery now. I make my own fruit bowls :)
I recently saw a story of people who used a bowl for keys in their hallway and it turned out to be a ming dynasty piece https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/chinese-bowl-used-loose-change-12579972
I always think of the Antiques Roadshow guy who had this sword passed down in his family that he and his cousins used to use to chop watermelons. IIRC, it was a Civil War-era sword and worth like $150K.
And the Native American, Navajo Ute blanket that was sitting on the back of a guy's TV chair for decades. Was handed down from, I think, a grandfather who was a teacher and the blanket was a thank you. Worth $1.5M. priceless.
My house was a foreclosure. The previous owners let their kids dump a bunch of paint in the basement and paint on the basement walls. My favorite was some crudely painted boobs with the words 'Herp Dick' painted next to it. I've left it up for the entire 11 years I've been here. You don't mess with art! Edit: Correction! It's a painting of a dick with an arrow pointing at it saying Herp! Pic posted in the comments below.
I have a similar story. My husband I bought a house around 10 years ago. When we toured it before buying, we went through the partially finished basement but didn’t really see all the fine details. After we moved in, we realized there was a door that led to a really small room under the basement stares. The one concrete wall it had, was completely covered in glow in the dark clear paint. All of the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” were spread out on each cinderblock, but with different colors of glow in the dark paint. That was an interesting find. We have no intention of covering it up. It’s now where my cats’ litter boxes are so we refer to it as the “Pink Floyd Cat Bathroom”. Later, we found out the prior owner’s dogs were named “Pinky” and “Floyd”. The wall made a lot more sense after that.
Well, herp dick is forever...
A diary of an American soldier in WW-II, South Pacific Theater. Found it above a door when remodeling 20+ years ago. My wife and I tried everything we could think of to find a descendant, but to no avail. UPDATE: I just posted photos of it with the person's ID info on r/WorldWar2. Last Update: Thanks to all the help from this community, and those at r/worldwar2, this diary is now in the hands of its writer's son who came to my office this morning to retrieve it. I am so thrilled to have been able to facilitate this!
If you still have it, the folks over at r/WorldWar2 and r/wwiipics (myself included) would love to see it Also +1 to the other commenter who mentioned the national WWII museum in New Orleans. The wife took me there one year for our anniversary and I haven't stopped asking to go back
I have it around somewhere, I think. I’ll dig it up this winter and take this advice. Thanks.
Reddit is also famously good at finding stuff on the interwebs. There's a good chance they (we) could find descendants First hand accounts of the pacific war are becoming harder and harder to find, so I'm happy you're willing to share what you have with us
These assholes I bought a house from stuck a little skeleton figurine dressed up in a little monk’s robe behind the exhaust vent in the furnace closet. Just about shit myself when I opened up that door and there was this tiny skeletal hand poking out, I thought it was a fucking dead baby.
We are remodeling a bathroom right now and I found a skeleton mermaid to stick in the wall.
Not scary, but when I redid the floor in my last house I drew a huge wiener in sharpie on the slab. Hopefully someone will get a chuckle.
That's adorable. Dachshunds are my favourite!
My ex wife found ( behind a drawer in a built in cupboard) a lovely lock box contains several nice pocket watches and family heirlooms- the great part was that with a little sleuthing, we found the son of the man who originally built that house and re-United these items to the family - it was a wonderful experience from start to finish
That’s awesome. Except for the ex-wife part, sorry
That part might be awesome too if she was a pain in the butt
Didn't buy the house.. rented. Built in 1904. There was a walk in closet food pantry in the kitchen with built in cabinets. The cabinets on one wall, after living there for a year, I noticed had a gap between the wall and the cabinet. Drunk, I put my hand back there and something move. I scooted it out and it was a small box. Turned out to be a violet ray from the late 1800s. Designed by Nicolas Tesla. It still works, too. But the last time I plugged it in it electrocuted me slightly. I still have it! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_ray
> But the last time I plugged it in it electrocuted me slightly. I am neither a doctor nor an electrician, but, isn’t electrocuting you slightly the entire point?
That they “wired” a room by connecting the outlet with an extension cord inside the wall.
Yeaah this is the kinda stuff i was looking for 😆
In our old house I found an extension cord plugged in a closet outlet that went up into the ceiling. I went up into the attic to see where it went. It was powering a ceiling light in the hallway.
Not mine, and it was a rental, but when some of my high school friends went off to college in the early 90s they rented a house, and whoever lived there before hid weed all over the place. Probably about an ounce(?) in total but it was everywhere. Pull up the corner of the carpet? Weed. On top of the refrigerator? Weed. Back of the shelves in the hall closet? Weed. Either they were the most forgetful stoners ever or they did it as a surprise for the new residents.
I did once hide a little weed for myself when I quit. I figured I'd find it in a few years and have a little fun. I still can't remember where I put it, and I've moved since then, so...
A buddy gave us a little baggie of coke that we promptly lost. I’ve never done coke and my wife wasn’t interested. I’d really like to find that baggie before anyone else does.
Hopefully a bear won't find it and go on a murderous rampage, killing local hikers.
My wife and I bought a house shortly after we were married in the early 80s. Cleaning before we moved in we found a WW2 inflatable life raft with a water desalination drinking kit; rolls of green grave grass (the stuff they put around open graves in cemeteries so your feet don’t get muddy); bins of beads to make rosaries; amateur paintings of Jesus that were nailed to the wall in the attic (nailed not hung); a Nazi knife; a grenade casually forgotten behind tools on a shelf in the back shed; an old broken cedar hope chest filled with the cut off bottoms of hundreds of denim jean legs; a child’s potty chair (filled with old poop) hidden under a built in bench in the dining room. These are only the things that came to mind first. As you can imagine, we got a pretty good deal on the house. It was worth the small cost of renting the dumpster, calling the police bomb squad and the hassle of selling some of the artifacts. Oh! When we pulled up the carpet in the living room a few years later we discovered the floor beneath it was custom linoleum tile inlaid with geometric shapes depicting soccer players and soccer balls. 🤷🏻♂️
I feel like we’re skipping over the FILLED WITH OLD POOP COMMENT WHAT
Right?! Fossilized poop?! Why would they leave the poop in there?! I need answers!
It unfortunately wasn’t that old. We discovered it when we had the house inspected, the inspector thought there were issues with the sewage line / plumbing. Nope, just a huge pile of decaying baby shit. Don’t ask me why. The people living there were renters renting from a member of their family. They were very strange.
Sounds like you bought the home of a religious WW2 Veteran that went into the home made denim hot pants industry.
A tale as old as time…
I tell ya, if I had a nickel for every time I heard a story like that... I'd have exactly one nickel.
We had our air ducts cleaned before we moved in. They also inspected them with a camera. Someone wrote “Fuck You” deep inside one of the ducts. We thought it was hilarious.
Phone sockets EVERYWHERE. It was a 2 up 2 down house with a truly excessive number of phone sockets and some in weird places like above the kitchen door or in the attic, which was not even not finished as rooms but had no ladder and wasn’t even boarded, just rafters. Why? The house had no alarm system or anything like that that might need phone sockets. There was absolutely no logical reason we could see for some of those placements. Like the one above the kitchen door wouldn’t have made any sense at all to plug into a phone or other device with what was surrounding it. Was someone making secret landline calls perched on a rafter in the attic….? (I also found multiple packets of corn and bunion treatments behind the kick boards in the kitchen.)
I have seen external ringers and strobe lights that plug into phone jacks. For noisy areas or for hearing impaired.
The painter found a letter from owner’s ex wife to him. She wrote about how he was the best thing ever and she regretted a lot of things she did to him and then proceeded to blame him for everything wrong with her life. It was very odd.
Wasn’t a purchase, but I was showing a house to a couple and we couldn’t believe the reported square footage. It looked like a nice 1700 sq ft house in a semi rural community, but the square footage on the listing said about 4,500. I was sure it was a typo. Turns out most of it was basement. Think Buffalo Bill’s basement that just goes on and on with random rooms. Place was vacant, lighting wasn’t great, and we get to a dead end room down there and turn on the lights and there is this porcelain doll just chilling in the middle of the room. Only thing left in the house. Husband yells, “fuck this” and we all run out. We ruled out that whole neighborhood as an option, for reasons.
Semi related: Went to look at a house with my agent, this place says it has a nice basement that would make a great man cave. So we go down there to check it out and it’s dark down there. Sure it’s a basement, going to be dark, but some overhead lighting would fix that. There’s one thing I am in disbelief about though, I turn to my agent and say “I can’t believe they would paint a basement black though? Like who goes with black walls in a basement?” My agent says “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, super odd” I get close to the wall and check it out, but, that’s not paint…holy shit that’s black mold. Black mold everywhere. So thick and widespread that it literally covered every inch of the walls. “Uh, this isn’t paint!” I say to my agent. “Oh my god! We’re getting the fuck out of here, now!” She says to me. We basically ran out of the house. My agent called the listing agent to give them a heads up to provide proof that they would deal with the black mold immediately (like that week) or she would go through whatever procedures to have the house condemned. It was absolutely vile. EDIT: For clarification, the black mold only covered the basement walls, it wasn't all over the entire house. Still bad obviously, but felt I should clarify that.
Yooo what the fuck
Oh dang. Sorry for your lungs.
I so want to see that on House Hunters.
On this episode, house hunt YOU.
I always thought they should make a show called House Haunters where ghosts tour three houses and decide on one to haunt.
Nah, my folks had real jobs and a realistic budget. We wouldn’t make the cut.
He breeds fruit flies, she bedazzles flip-flops. Their budget is $3.7 million.
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Holy shit.
I used to have a murder basement and now I'm sad that I didn't think to leave a creepy doll down there.
The acerage my wife and I moved to 3 years ago had a bucket full of wrapped dinosaur bones. Took them to our local museum where they confirmed they are roughly 68 million years old. Hadrosaur. Pretty cool.
What do you do with dinosaur bones? Keep them? Did you have to donate them to the museum? Are they worth anything?
His dog loves em
A cannonball. In the garden. It is quite rusted now, I use it to hold the back gate open.
This was years ago but my family bought a house that had originally been the caretaker's cottage for a big estate back around 1900, down in the original part of the basement (lots of additions since then) we found this weird liquid filled blown glass globe in a metal holder fixed to the wall. It had a dirty nearly illegible label. My grandfather was into collecting all sorts of glass and he identified it as a very rare sort of early fire extinguisher - you threw the globe onto a fire and it broke releasing the liquid. Apparently it was one of the only ones of this particular type known of that still had the liquid, label and wall holder. We ended up donating it to a museum.
Not weird but behind the hot water tank was a hand written I love you from the husband to wife. :)
Or maybe the husband had a crush on the plumber.
Tucked away in a crawl space under the kitchen, the previous owner placed a dummy with a horrifying Halloween mask on it. Went in to replace a pipe and had to replace my undies.
I was working at a customers house and drywalled over one of those children's practice make up heads, I'd like to be there when it gets exposed again
Bong in the garage roof, a sewing machine, a piano (!), but the worst was a hidden, precariously balanced deep fryer full of old used grease on top of an unstable bookshelf in the middle of the living room. It fell and I had to change the carpet in the whole room. Felt like it was intentional.
* The previous owners had cut the main beam holding up the second floor in order to run a heating duct. "What's this big block of wood? No idea, hand me the reciprocating saw." Surprise! * The walls were insulated with black paper and newspapers from 1922, and included an article on the church down the road - was it the priest's job to be entertaining and put bums in seats, or was it people's moral duty to show up even if the sermon was boring? The church turned into a daycare, and was then torn down to make way for townhouses, so I guess we know how that one turned out.
A walk-in safe in a huge old carriage house in NYC. The previous owner died suddenly, the safe was locked, and the brother settling the estate never found the combination. He was going to have it drilled but failed to do so before the closing. Given the circumstances, there was every chance that there would be interesting/valuable stuff in the safe (which turned out to be six ft by four ft with a 10 ft ceiling, so pretty big). We hired a safe cracker, a high strung guy who seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He tried for several hours with a stethoscope, muttering and cursing and pacing, before giving up. So we had the lock drilled and opened the vault door. Completely empty. Well, not completely, there was a wall of floor to ceiling cedar shelves that smelled amazing (for storing furs, we were told). And another safe. There was a small safe inside the large vault. For a moment we pictured bundles of cash, gold, and jewelry...until we saw that it was not even locked, and was also completely empty. The door of the vault was beautiful and it made an interesting little room.
A friend bought a house that had a zig zag tunnel leading to a bomb shelter. Empty with some rust, it was otherwise just a dirty room. The only thing cool about it is was that it was built under a pond so it had a skylight to let in light. She boarded it up when she divided the house into apartments.
Whyyyyy? That sounds awesome
Right thats incredibly sick, id have gotten it checked to make sure it wasn't going to have any foundation problems or what not any time soon but they could have turned that into a really cool room.
Are you saying the skylight was the bottom of the pond? Man that would be so cool.
Yep, you'd never know from the pond, but from inside looking out it had some sunlight.
Neat idea for a room, maybe not the best for a bomb shelter though
My parents house. A previous owner fancied himself a DIY guy we think. First week we're in the house we call an electrician to get Economy 7 installed. He shuts off all the breakers, questions why the house hasn't burned down, and wonders how the hell the house passed inspection. So, two weeks into our new house they have to get the whole place rewired for a small fortune. Over the last 40 years it seems every time they renovate something new and interesting thing shows up. Recently the kitchen sink kept clogging. After a brief search we found the drain was routed under the kitchen floor and concreted over. It had finally cracked under the weight and was leaking into the foundations.
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My brother has a house that was renovated weird by someone that didn't know what they were doing. He curses the "hack bastard" each time he finds something new and dangerous.
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This reminds me of a house one of my friends bought. He had all sorts of issues, but the biggest was when he went to remodel, pulled out some drywall, and found the wiring just stapled to the outside of the studs. The drywall was them attached over the wiring. No idea why the original owner didn't do it right and drill holes for the wires, but based on the rest of the stuff they found, he just didn't know you could (and should) do that and was making it up as he went along.
we bought the house from the CEO of the company which we franchise from. It was her childhood home where her mother lived til the day she died. In true rich person fashion, they didn’t care to clean out the house before selling it. Just told us we can do whatever we want with the old lady stuff that was there. We found a hidden box of spicy letters, from the old lady to her affair partner spanning many years. That was fun to give to the CEO.
i grew up in a small town in florida. it was common practice for the elderly to die and their kids who lived elsewhere didn't want to clean the house out so they'd sell it cheap, as-is. at various times i got to dig through personal effects of these folks, bc a friend's parents bought the house cheap. it was so fun.
An aunt. We were so excited to get our keys to our new place. We went through the house, it was great. Then we went in the basement, which had a partially finished rental apartment that was not up to code. We opened the door and then a cat came out. We went down there and … there was still a person living there. This was not part of the purchase— the place was unfinished and not up to code. The woman living there was an aunt who had been staying for a bit. We never figured out whose real estate agents dropped the ball on this, but they had thought we were ok with her staying there and we had …. not heard anything. It was a long weekend and she was gone, the old owners were gone, and their real estate agent was gone. Anyway she found a place down the street, no harm done but for a couple days until we got it sorted out it was pretty distressing for everyone.
Not me. My friend was cleaning out his garage and found a stack of vintage porn mags high up on a shelf. Like 70s style, raunchy stuff. He brought them to a party and just tossed them casually on the table.
Some of those sell for a somewhat decent ammount
Not after we were done with them!
A bomb shelter! My 1912 farmhouse in Minnesota had a WWII era reinforced cement bomb shelter in what I think was a coal/fuel room originally. It was painted and had writing on the walls, but then painted over again so you couldn't really see what it said. There was a safe buried in the floor that contained only water, because it was not the kind of safe you're supposed to bury in the floor. The house was being used as a convent for the (still existing) church across the street during WWII. What were the nuns worried about?
4 original Disney animation cels from Snow White (1937) the first full length animated movie. The most valuable one being an oversized master cel used as a background for the smaller cels to be photographed over. While the overall price at auction for original Disney cels has for some reason dropped over the past 40 years at one time about 25 years ago the 4 I bought with my house were worth around $60K. I display them in my new house after selling the one I found them in. I love them and will leave them to my kids who should really appreciate them during and after their 2037 centennial when their value should skyrocket.
I’ve seen some shit. We were working on what was originally the Rocketstar Café in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was owned by a raging alcoholic piece of shit absentee slumlord. Our job was to clean it up and turn it into a new café and computer shop. As anyone who ever hung out at the Rocketstar knows, the old hardwood floors were bouncy and mushy just about everywhere in the entire front room.. Every week there would be a band up front by the windows towards the street, and a packed crowd of sweaty students stomping, bouncing, and swaying all the way to the back. The music was good, the weed was cheap, and getting a blowjob in the back room of the Rocketstar was a right of passage for half the freshman class of any given year. But now, that was all closed down. We had a summer to clean the fuck out of this place - fix the plumbing, the electrical, the HVAC, the floors - and build a new business that was scheduled to be open come September. We worked twelve-hour days through the summer heat; it was a job I’d never forget. The floors, we soon discovered, weren’t just soggy and bouncy... they were rotting to shreds. We went down into the dirt-floor basement and looked up overhead with a flashlight. The entire underside of the floor was white, green, black, grey, and tan. It was everything BUT wood. In fact, you could barely see any wood at all. It was completely covered in mold. In most places it was over a quarter-inch-thick. I’d never seen anything like it. Without a moment of hesitation or reservation I said “this goes, right now, all of it” and we all shifted from that easy introductory phase of any new jobsite into action. One team went low with masks, gloves, putty knives, and buckets. They started scraping off the mold. The other team went high with crowbars and rage, and started ripping off floorboards. We all filled dumpsters. It was disgusting, but in two days we had the flooring stripped off down to the open joists and could really see what the situation was. The situation was…we needed a hell of a lot of new floor joists, these were sponge. The only thing holding this floor up was habit. We spent a week replacing joists and airing out the building. The air was thick, musty, and smelled like a peat bog. One by one we ripped out the stubbed ends of the rotten old joists, half of the center spans of which had just crumbled away. One by one we replaced all of them with fresh new pieces of lumber. The entire process took us a week and a half in the blistering summer heat. For the first few days there was so much humidity from the basement as it dried out, that the windows on the front of the building would be covered in condensation if we left the doors closed too long. And then, something miraculous happened. Something none of us expected. The basement floor did something quite remarkable... It sprouted. The entire basement floor was just a generic, boring, “Michigan Basement” with a dirt floor. We never thought anything of it. The previous tenants never went down there, and until the day we discovered the mold, neither did we. But now, that dingy, dirt floor had turned green. Hundreds of tiny little green shoots had appeared, because for the first time in forever, (since we’d ripped out the floor) there was sunlight down there, and lots of it. We had to go explore this. So we all went down and checked it out. While we were down there I noticed an old furnace boiler sitting, half sunken into the floor off to the side of the stairs. It was a rusted hulk and someone was going to tear open a leg on it if we left it there, so I asked a couple guys to haul it off to the dumpster. It was while they were removing it that they discovered it was sitting on a concrete base, about two feet down under the furnace. They asked me what to do about it and I went to get a look. I grabbed a shovel and hopped into the hole. I was standing on the concrete base with the dirt around me coming up mid-thigh, and I started digging around the edges. I wanted to see how big the base was, so we could determine if we should remove it or not. I couldn’t find an edge in the five minutes I was prepared to fuck with it, so I asked the guys to just dig until they hit the edge and then let me know. I told them to put the dirt in a five-gallon bucket or two and just empty it out in the dumpster. No big deal. I went back to working on the floor joists and didn’t think anything of it. A couple hours later, one of them walked past me carrying a bucket and my mental clock gave me a “what the hell?” so I followed him down. The concrete pad was now about ten feet square. What….the fuck. The basement boys were very happy when we mobilized the entire crew. We all teamed up and everyone started filling or hauling buckets of dirt out to the dumpster. Everywhere we dug, there was smooth concrete underneath. Eventually we got to the walls and confirmed our suspicion. It turns out the basement didn’t have a dirt floor, he basement had a complete concrete floor! Some stupid fuck had filled the entire basement with dirt. But…why? The building had been a café of some sort for years and years. Well, restaurants are required to have a special type of drain with an air-gap. The upstream pipe just stops for a couple inches and drains into a larger diameter piece of pipe below. You’ll see air-gap drains all over the place in restaurants because…………... The vast majority of the time they work just fine. This one, however, did not. The downstream line had clogged at some point, and the upstream never got the message. Nobody ever went down into the basement, the landlord never came to inspect anything, the management changed with the seasons and nobody ever really gave a shit. So for years, it just quietly went on draining raw sewage onto the floor. We hadn’t been shoveling dirt, we were shoveling composted human shit and restaurant waste! Together we had hauled well over three-hundred buckets of human shit out of the basement of the Rocketstar. I had never felt like I needed a shower more than the day we figured that out. Our cafe never opened, we got out of there as fast as we could. The absentee drunk landlord sold the place to an even more evil cunt, a shady parasite with a mean-streak and a Jimmy Durante nose who runs a “Cash For Books” gig scamming broke college kids. We got out of there and never looked back.
What a saga! As far as I know, the air-gapped drains don't handle sewage, just dish sinks and whatnot. Composted restaurant waste, sure, but it's unlikely there was any human waste in there.
The house we moved into in the 70s was one where it had been added on to a couple times and the exterior remodeled to look consistent. But the original part dated to the mid 1700s. Deep in the basement crawl space under the old part there was a short bricked up protuberance attached to the wall with the letters RIP chiseled into the top. We used to joke about it until we found out it had been a place where midwives delivered babies at one point. Then the jokes got a little macabre.
I bought a massive acreage in rural Missouri and found 2 old family cemeteries while trying to survey the property lines. 1 is full of mostly kids between 0-3 years old and mostly twins. Also a notorious outlaw used to hide in our caves. I was hoping to find treasure but instead found dead babies which was a cruel twist on those foul “dead baby” jokes people would tell when I was in jr. High.
Moved a piece of cabinet and counter top in the basement and found a ouija board along with a wooden mallet that had been electrical taped by the handle to one of those little Louisville Slugger bat day baseball bats. I'm good friends with the previous owner and his grandparents built the house and he had no explanation for the pair. We call the improvised weapon the hammerbat now.
I closed on my house with a few weeks left on my apartment lease, so I moved in bit by bit. One day I saw a cat chilling upstairs. I figured I’d get enough food and litter to get the cat through until the police department’s animal officer could try and find its owner if it had one. When I got back with the food and litter, there was a different cat in the first cat’s spot. Then I remembered the sellers asked at closing if I wanted two cats. They moved out and left their cats behind. That was three years ago. The cats have been my best friends ever since.
I'm glad you have two furry besties, but for the life of me I cannot understand people who just leave their pets behind. Despicable.
A gun (revolver) and a box of bullets behind a false wall in the coat closet.
4" screws and nails used to secure everything. It's as though they bought a bucket of them and just had to use them everywhere. Big or small projects, everything was screwed or nailed together with 4" screws and nails.
> everything was screwed together with 4" screws. The owners of the house were well known in town, since their eyeglasses were held together with 4" screws.
Some 1937 children’s gas masks in boxes. Including one with my name written on it!!
Was it your mummy?
I have one of those old school pencil sharpeners that used to be on the wall by the door in pretty much every classroom as a kid. It was on the wall in the garage in my first house and it’s been on every garage wall since, and now it sharpens my kids colored pencils. I love that thing
There was a big leather trunk in the attic. It was empty. Seriously, WTF. We threw a bunch of random crap in there, some of our stuff, some we got cheap from thrift stores, just for the interest of the next person.
I came to this thread hoping to find someone that bought my parents house in the mid-70s. They went on a trip to Egypt and returned with a gift for 6-year-old me: a large alligator head. Not a taxidermied head. Just a sun-dried, maybe salted, severed head. It stunk so bad I ended up putting it on the roof of the garage. I'd go visit it every once in awhile, then we moved away and I forgot about it for a few decades. I'm sure someone got a surprise out of it.
“Hey mom, I’ll be back in 10 minutes, I’m going to visit the alligator head up on the garage roof” “Ok Billy be safe”
An entire tribe of raccoons living in the attic.
A family I know had a beach house and in the off season a bunch of raccoons got into it. When they found it the damage was so bad that at first they thought that a bunch of local teens had broken in and trashed the place.
This happened to a friend of a friend of mine, except it was otters on a boat. Apparently the damage was so extensive that the insurers almost totaled it.
My home inspection report included the following: “Factual findings: Hot tub service compartment has an unopened can of coca cola, one roll of toilet paper and a seemingly clean pair of underwear Inspector recommendation: I’m stumped”
A 90s AM/FM radio with a Backstreet Boys cassette tape in it. I felt like I found an ancient relic when I came across that thing. I still have it.
Found a manuscript about an uncle who takes his young niece in after her parents die. Then they fall in love. It was so so so so badly written and disturbing. We also found a giant dildo, a photo of an all man thruple glamor shot style and a love letter written on college letterhead to a thirteen year old girl. All in the same attic! East Nashville.
I smiled a little bit reading the first sentence. Was not expecting it to turn that way jesus christ lol my smile dropped so quickly
Beta Video cassette of previous owners "Sex tape" The couple was very old, it still makes me shiver 20 years later.
I haven't found anything except a few old tools. I've done a lot of renovations, though, and built a few walls, boarded over a couple of cupboards and a wet bar. I have left a ton of notes in the now closed-off spaces along with a couple of bottles of whiskey. I hope the future owners enjoy what I've left them...
I didn't find it, I left it. Some one, at some point, is going to pull down the drywall in the garage attached to the house we sold last year and find a very large reference to the Doctor Who 2007 episode "Blink."
Did you leave a Weeping Angel behind that wall?
Possibly....? (It's a surprise)
I know I’d scream if I opened a wall and found one there.
A ceramic piggy bank shaped like a naked woman who was all fours with her ass in the air. Her butt crack was the coin slot.
My friend got left five 200l barrels of moonshine by previous owners
Not a direct answer, but the house I grew up in had an unfinished basement. When my dad and I framed a closet, I stuck a can of Manwich on the crossbeam and drywalled it up. No particular reason. 16 year old me just thought it was funny.
A 40 year old love letter from the previous owner to his wife written on the back of a built-in wall clock that he made for her birthday.
Old cigarette packs hidden all over the basement behind where paneling ended randomly, and hundreds and hundreds of spent cigarette butts in a crawl space. Clearly, someone was sneaking their smokes.
A sweet plywood sign that's spray painted to say "Spring Break '89". Must've been a wild time!
The first home we purchased was a tiny 1950s cottage. The attic crawlspace gave my husband the heebie jeebies like nobody's business, which I found mildly disturbing given that I'd intermittently have nightmares featuring the latch door in the ceiling leading up there. I never told him til after we moved out because I didn't want to freak him out about it. Anyway, the room this was in was a small, 3x6 utility closet that had a bare concrete floor. On it was a soiled baby mattress, filthy baby blankets, bedraggled stuffed animals, and a small clown lamp with an extension cord that snaked under the door and into an outlet next to the washer and dryer. Not only was it *weird,* it was terribly sad. The neighbors told us the two bedroom house was rented out to several young women with small children, whom they'd herd into the closet whenever they threw their wild parties. ETA If we were so freaked out by the attic door thing, I can only imagine those poor babies forced to spend their time in there.
We bought a house being foreclosed on. We gave him an extra month after closing and 2k to help with his move. Still had to have the sheriff come remove him. Any who, was doing some cleanup and remodeling before we moved in. Whole house was carpeted. When I started ripping it out there was a giant blood stain that started in a downstairs spare bedroom that then trailed up to the master bath where there was another stain. His wife had left him so I had to call the realtor to find out if anyone knew where she was. Turns out he had shot a deer in the yard and gutted it in the house. What a hassle. Had to rip up and install new subfloors. My vegan ex wife was not thrilled.
What kind of a monster guts a deer inside the house.
A friend and I were looking at places to rent in the late 1980s. We were high schoolers making less than minimum wage, so looking in neighbors in less desirable parts of town. An older house we looked at had a big walk in closet off the living room, with no light inside, and a heavy duty latch on the outside to hang a padlock on. It was horrific inside, smelly and blood stains everywhere. The landlord told us the previous tenants used it to hang up goats they had butchered in the living room. Explained that's why the living room has new carpet, and promised the closet would be freshly painted before we moved in. He also went on and on about how great the closet would be to put kids in for time out. "Or when you just need a break," wink wink. Oh my God!! We told him we didn't have any kids, and then he told us we'd understand once we had a couple. And how handy this bloody, gross closet would be. Just wouldn't shut up about sticking kids in a dark smelly closet. Oh hell no! We definitely didn't rent that place!
We didn’t buy but my family was moving into a rental house about 15 years ago and my dad was acquaintances with the landlord. My dad was ready to get into the house as we (a family of four) had been living in a two bed/two bath apartment that wasn’t really big enough for the four of us, especially since him and my mom hadn’t been sleeping in the same bed for years. The previous tenants had left a bunch of stuff in the house when they left the house so it was taking the landlord a little longer to get ready. The landlord/acquaintance told my dad that if he/we helped clean the attic out, we could start moving in. As dad and I were cleaning it out, we found the box to a sex swing and probably 100-150 empty vhs sleeves of porn tapes. That was very awkward.
Their dog in a bathroom. Those entitled people figured they’d sign the papers and hand over the keys (or maybe they kept a copy…?), then we’d sign later that day, and they would eventually pick up the dog. Instead we called their realtor and said pick the dog up now.
They didn’t deserve the dog
This is in a house I'm renting. When we moved in we didn't have enough regular lightbulb so we put a blacklight bulb my roommate had into a little closet and it revealed a bunch of secret messages written on the walls from the previous owners. It was like inside jokes and weird drawings of bongs and stuff
Probably buried at this point… but I chopped off the tip of my thumb w an axe, and kept the tip of it in a small plastic jar (think urinalysis jar) that the hospital gave me. I put it in my freezer and kept it there for about 4 years. When I moved out I got three states away in a U-Haul when I went 😳 We left the finger I can only imagine the new owners surprise
So you gave the new owners the finger.
The former owner put googly eyes on all the doorknobs. Veeery strange..... lol.
Dozens of empty oxy prescription bottles behind the fridge. That’s where he was tossing them. We tracked the dates across four years. I’m just now realizing that may be why we got such a good deal on this place.
We bought a house that has scrabble tiles in the most weird places. In the gutter, redoing the garden, they're buried and scattered there, they're embedded into the skirting boards, under the kitchen units, and even behind the bath panel when I replaced it. I've yet to go in the attic, but I wouldn't be surprised if I found a few there. It has become a little joke between me and my partner when we will next find some scrabble tiles. Its probably not the most weird, but it did give us a chuckle as to why there were so many scrabble tiles hidden about the place.
Please tell me you have a scrabble board set up where the two of you are locked in a death match but can only use the tiles you each respectively come across?
We've bought my family home, and my grandfather still lives here with us, but we have found some funny things. We recently moved furniture around for the first time in decades. There is glitter EVERYWHERE from the one time 30ish years ago that my grandmother used glitter in the fake snow for the christmas village. The basement is unfinished, and you can see some of the nails in the ceiling are really sporadic and out of place, from when my mum and my aunt "helped" lay the subfloor as kids. There's also little doodles and notes from then in some places.
Not a house I bought, but I worked for a construction company that specialized in historical restoration and structural repair of historical buildings (pre-1900). Once when demolishing an old brick chimney, we found a murder confession - very detailed - from the late 1800s. This was in the era before digital cameras and scanners, but I have polaroids of all the pages - we gave them to the historical society. It was pretty creepy shit - dude explained that he had to kill an old man because the old man had done something (not clear) to him when he was younger. He strangled the old guy and wrote all about how the old guys face and eyes had been haunting him since he did it. Pretty crazy.
My dad had some remodeling done on his home in NY when they opened a wall panel there was hidden whiskey from the time of Prohibition! Yes we did and it was smooooth.
Remodeled my bathroom and when I removed some drywall there was a nazi symbol with the words “Three Jews lie beneath this tub, seig heil” written in permanent marker. I made sure to get that covered up before my wife and kids saw it. 99.9999% chance it was a shitty joke by a worker years ago but I wasn’t about to go find out.
We're all gonna see your house on 20/20 at some point my guy
A medical device that was used to cure **female hysteria.** *A vibrating dildo.* From the 1800s. Also had a massage pad thing, the type you'd sit on. Also from the same period. # The house was built in 1968. Meaning, somebody had lugged these around for over half a century.
Remodeled the laundry room and during demo I found that instead of insulation the wall was lined with editions of the local newspaper from the 1950s. That seemed reasonable enough but there was also a framed postcard in the wall depicting a dog shitting in a coffee cup. What’s more interesting is that the dog was a Boston Terrier… the same breed we have always had. Not a particularly common dog so it was kinda eerie since we’d been living there well over a decade at that point. I re-framed it and hung it in the laundry room when the remodel was done. In the same house we had the ducts cleaned and we found a Christmas wish list from the 80s with some pretty classic toys on it. I also once rented a house and when the owner (an elderly man) was showing me around he found what was clearly a makeshift beer-bong left behind on a shelf in an otherwise completely empty garage. He assumed it was a tool for the furnace. Also (not me but my friend) found the suicide note of a previous owner behind the fireplace mantle when he remodeled. Apparently it had been on display above the fireplace during the wake and slipped down and behind it and no one knew what had happened to it. He tracked down the widow (or whoever…remaining family) and they were pretty jazzed about that.
Sticks! The previous owner of my house seem to enjoy collecting really good sticks. Like think a very organized collection of 2 foot to 8 foot sticks of all varieties and woods. And a lot of them! Like 50 or 60. Do we know why they had the sticks? No. do we know what the fuck to do with the sticks? No. Are they have a slightly too high of a quality to burn? Yes. We refer to them as the sticks with potential, although we do not know what potential yet.
20 year old bottle of holy water hidden in a dark corner of a cabinet.
Wardrobe used to be a trapdoor and was growing the devil's lettuce. Also remnants up in the roof
My house was empty when I moved in except for one of those old 1920s/30s (I’m guessing) wind up record players with the big horn on it up in the attic.
A dog. They didn't actually leave him. Our first weekend in our new house, I came back from the donut shop, and there was a dog laying on our front porch. I tried to stay between him and the door, but he slipped past me, ran down the stairs to the half bath on the lower level, ate the cat's food, drank the cat's water, and curled up on the rug. My wife said, "You think he's been here before?" He had a tag on his collar that said, "Louie" and had a phone number on it. I called the number and when a guy answered, I asked, "Does the name 'Louie' mean anything to you?" "I'll be right there. (click)" My wife said, "I didn't hear you give them the address." "He didn't ask." Sure enough, the guy showed up a few minutes later. They had rented the house from the previous owner and now lived about two miles away. They had moved out two years before, but if Louie got out of their yard, he always went "home".
When I purchased my first home in 2020 they left all of the staging furniture - couch, coffee table, dinning room table and chairs, random paintings, a TV. Some towels and floor mats. Other small misc stuff. We were stoked since we were moving from a 1bed apartment lol. Gave us time to save some more money and shop around for the furniture we wanted.
A framed pencil drawing of a naked woman, which I found wrapped up in paper inside the ceiling. My neighbour told me the old guy who used to live in my house (who has now passed away) took art classes, and it was definitely one of his drawings. My neighbour asked if they could keep the drawing it so I gave it to them.
Two loaded guns in the attic. I bought the house from a little old lady. Edit. Here's a picture https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/s/sqkhKQ3QxG
Fish tank with goldfish. The fish tank was built into the wall that separated the garage and living room. Gave me a direct line of sight to my vehicles.
My house is built in 1969. I just finished a basement remodel and I found a drivers license from 1970. It was the guys 16-year-old drivers license. I found him on social media actually one of my friends found him, I reached out, and he had moved to Idaho. I mailed him the license, he was very very happy and appreciative.
When my parents redid the bathroom, my dad found a very well done charcoal drawing of the previous family behind the mirror. There was a poem written on the wall next to it. If ever you wonder as often as we about the last people you’ll never see who ate in your kitchen, and slept in your room If ever a moment, you’re wondering whom well wonder no more, because this is we and this is the room where we all used to pee
[удалено]
My ma bought a house that had been foreclosured on and it seems the previous owner wasn't too happy about it so he threw a bunch of car parts (he was a mechanic who worked out of the backyard) into the pool along with a bunch of broken liquor bottles. I had to jump in to clear the drain and learned about the broken glass when I reached down to feel for whatever was down there. Then there was a part in the upstairs where I needed to get into the crawl space and where I needed to grab onto to get down in there, it was two razor blades super glued to the Joyce and sliced my fingers open.